It seems to be a fundamental decision from fusion, to only allow the selection of 'profiles' in the selection panels of 3D model features like extrude or revolve or also patch features. 'profiles' being areas between lines and splines.
I would vote for two additions, which should be selectable in this field:
1. Selection of dedicated lines. Why?:
- It can be reasonable to put several interacting sketch elements into one single sketch. When you do this in fusion, you fracture the resulting profiles into smaller ones. With the ability to select lines as well, and you would like to e.g. extrude an outer contour, you could just select the one contour line instead of all of the containing profiles.
- For me it seems like a missing feature. Selecting profiles can be helpful, but in other instances also painfull. Sure, you could add another sketch, project the desired contour and then extrude from this sketch. But even then, Fusion sees all the other lines from invisible sketches within the same plane, which creates more and more fractured profiles.
2 Selection of a sketch as a whole. Why?:
- I am using this in Solidworks a lot. Create a sketch that only contains the desired lines (and maybe construction lines as well) and feed only the sketch to the 3D feature operation of your choice. If you change the sketch at a later point in your timeline, the rebuild processor will get no problems (given that your changes to the sketch are valid). If you change sketch elements in fusion at a later point in the timeline, you will need to reselect all the individual profiles again within every 3D feature operation. It could be so much easier having a 'select sketch' option.
- One more use for this. When referencing other parts from within a component, i like to create reference sketches in the beginning as some form of interface. These sketches copy lines from other parts within the same assembly. If you happen to loose contact to your assembly or you want to rebuild the component as a standalone, you can just enter these reference sketches, delete the reference constraint (aka 'project' in fusion) and add your own dimensions.
Let me know, what others think about this. Also let me know, if i missed an already existing feature.
